Grace

It’s Thursday after dinner and my phone pings to let me know I have an email. Without pause, I click to read the incoming message even though it’s my school account and by all means could wait until morning. And that’s when it happens. The opening line, “My son came home crying from school today…” goes on to tell me what I’ve done to cause this student such pain that he never wants to return to school. In truth, these incidents are always minor and always an unintentional slight, but to a parent with a child in tears, the feelings are serious and demand attention right now.

These messages occur just often enough that the sting never really goes away and the fear of upsetting another parent hovers over me throughout my days in the classroom. Despite all the effort I put into teaching, there will always be an upset parent who will email me (or worse yet, my principal) to let me know of something I’ve done wrong. The last time it happened, it was during conferences and due to our departmentalized teaching structure this year, my entire team of colleagues got to hear all about my latest transgression directly from a parent during group conferences.

I don’t know many people who take criticism well, but I always feel blindsided by it and it really knocks me down. Profound words of wisdom say, “Don’t take it personally” but it is personal and it was aimed right at me, and so I don’t know any other way to take it.

This last time, I thought about a conversation I had years ago with a former administrator. She shared with me that, most of the time, people just want to feel heard. That truly listening and letting them vent can often take stressful, tension-filled situations down several notches and then a healthy, more open-minded conversation can truly begin. Taking these words to heart, I decided to try putting them into practice.

The first thing I did was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I took time before responding at all and this was a critical change for me. My initial response is often defensive and it isn’t productive to speak from a place of fear, anxiety or compensation. I want to speak from truth and that takes time to reach. I took time to breathe, to think, and to reflect. After pausing for a short while, I recognized my anxiety and defensiveness about this particular situation wasn’t going away in the next hour. I took a breath and sent off a brief, calm, reply thanking the parent for bringing the situation to my attention and promising to give it my full reflection. I thought about an appropriate and proportionate amount of time to give myself and told the parent I would get back to them by the end of the next day. Even though I wasn’t feeling very magnanimous at that moment, even though I felt that this parent was way out of line for emailing me (and copying my principal on it!) about something that seemed quite petty, I chose to compose the email while exhaling and crafted a calm, open-minded, if currently faked, response. Even though I had to use imagined kindness in my initial response because my defenses already had my blood boiling, I wanted to convey involvement and interest in reconciliation.

Having bought myself a little more time, I was now faced with the task of self-reflection. I’ve often skipped this step in my response to criticism. I go straight to Defensive Island and I never leave it. I build a fortress that makes sure that only those agreeing with me and supporting my side can enter. But the truth is, more often than not, what I have needed most is to see the other viewpoint with more clarity.

The process reminds me of the skycam used during televised professional football games. Upon replay, the announcers in the booth can stop the action at a critical point and swing the footage all the way around the incident to see all sides. It’s amazing what changes from this perspective. An apparent fumble can now be seen as an amazing catch given the right camera angle.

So it is with conflict. Given time and an open-mind, I was able to look at the situation from different angles. I stopped thinking about what happened from my shoes standing at the front of the classroom and instead, took a moment to figuratively sit at the student’s desk and think about what occurred. I thought about what I would have heard, seen and felt during that moment. Even after some time, I still didn’t think that what I had said was worth a chiding email, especially one shared with my principal, but I was able to imagine this student in a different light and I understood that the unintentional effects of what I had said included hurting a student. Unintended, sure, but still real pain.

Before the end of the next day, I phoned the parent. I could not have spoken calmly or respectfully the night before after reading the scathing email, but now I was able to listen once again to the concern of the parent and to then respond with compassion and understanding. While I explained my perspective I also, more importantly, owned the response of the student. I let the parent know that I not only heard what was being shared but that I felt the pain and that pain was something I would work to remedy in any way that I could. As all good apologies should, I included not only my words of remorse, but also my plan for reparations and for growth.

The call ended with the parent saying, “You’ve been such a great teacher for him all year, I’m glad we could work through this together. I will talk with him about what you said and help him see that you weren’t trying to hurt his feelings, but that you were trying to help him.”

I hung up the phone and exhaled and realized I was in a moment of grace. Criticism is part of my job. With nearly 60 students to teach this year, I touch a lot of lives each day. I’m human and fallible and even on my best days I can say and do things that are taken differently than intended. I need to remember to not only extend grace to the family – to give them the time, reflection and response that they are due, but also to extend grace to myself. To remember that my perspective from the front of the room is not the only one that matters. No matter how absurd the complaint, taking the time, using the “skycam” to gain perspective, and by rooting all that I do in kindness a harsh criticism can be a growing point for everyone. Especially me.